When it was purchased and installed in 1989, the Cray Y-MP8/864 — Ohio’s first state-owned
supercomputer — looked like it belonged on the set of a futuristic sci-fi movie.

The 7-ton, slate blue-and-black semicircular tower was a work of modern art that packed an
incredible computational punch.

Never mind that today’s smart phones hold more data and crunch it faster. In an age before the
Internet, the Cray was 200 times faster than the personal computers just gaining a foothold in
houses and offices.

For a short time, it was the fastest, most-powerful computer in the world.

“We used to joke that the difference between using a PC and a Cray was the difference between a
person walking across America and flying across America,” said Kevin Wohlever, a former Cray
employee who helped install the device in the fledgling Ohio Supercomputer Center.

A lot has changed since then. For example, that Cray is long gone. Wohlever, however, is
not.

As the center prepares to celebrate its 25th anniversary, Wohlever now is the center’s director
of supercomputing operations. And that’s a whole new frontier these days.

The current supercomputer that forms the center’s beating heart is actually a cluster of servers
named after famous Ohioan Annie Oakley. Linked by cables and clever software, the Oakley Cluster
can make 154 trillion calculations per second.

When it was installed last year, the Oakley Cluster was the 11th –most powerful supercomputer
among universities in the United States. Researchers who use the supercomputer servers free say
that’s nothing to sniff at.

Chris Orban, an Ohio State University astrophysicist, has used the supercomputer to model
theories on how dark matter particles can help form galaxies in an expanding universe.

More recently, he’s used the Oakley Cluster to model subatomic reactions in fusion power
experiments. Orban’s simulation, published recently in the journal
Physical Review E, shows how electrons in hydrogen atoms deflect the energy of a powerful
laser that’s intended to help trigger a fusion chain reaction.

“My whole career was greatly helped by the resources that are there,” he said. “They’ve given us
so much free supercomputer time — I just can’t say enough.”

That’s high praise for something that was born from failure.

OSU researchers failed twice in the 1980s to win the National Science Foundation funding needed
to form a national supercomputing center, said Russell Pitzer, an emeritus professor of chemical
physics.

“The centers that were funded initially had more established people,” Pitzer said. “They had
been great proponents for starting such centers.”

Pitzer and fellow OSU chemists were eager to get a supercomputer at Ohio State to help model
results of chemical reactions on a molecular level. Before any of the national supercomputer
centers opened at the University of Illinois or the University of San Diego, he and his colleagues
had to fly to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California to use the supercomputer
there.

“We’d spend usually a week out there and do that maybe three times a year,” Pitzer said.

Ohio’s fortunes changed, however, when the state Board of Regents and state lawmakers decided to
create their own supercomputer center without national support.

The commitment to create the center was significant. The Cray cost $22 million.

“In the old days, supercomputers were very expensive,” said John Heimaster, the OSU physics
department’s scientific computing director and, like Pitzer, a co-founder of the supercomputer
center.

“They were produced in a quantity of about a dozen for any particular model, and the production
cost had to be spread out over those machines.” he said. “It took two full-time repairmen to keep
this machine running.”

(By comparison, the Oakley Cluster cost $4.1 million last year.)

Over time, as computers grew ubiquitous, it made more sense to build supercomputers out of
commercially available parts.

The Ohio center’s computer core evolved over the years from the Cray to mainframes similar to
those used by businesses.

“A lot of supercomputing (today) is done on graphics processors that were designed for the
video-games market,” Heimaster said. “We parasite off what other people develop and use it for
science.”

The difference from then to now is one of scale — as computers grow in power, the experiments
grow in complexity.

Wohlever said the first Cray could, in a few hours, model the chemical interactions of as many
as eight molecules.

In a few hours, the Oakley could model the interactions of more than 1,000 molecules and use a
fraction of the cluster’s overall computing power.

Depending on how it’s used, the cluster can take on multiple jobs and offer as many as 135
million “computing hours” a year. That’s key for Ohio researchers who otherwise would have to
compete with scientists across the United States to log time at a national supercomputer
center.

There’s so much time that supercomputer center officials plan to make more of it available to
businesses and industry. Executive Director Pankaj Shah said the center will form more partnerships
with businesses that pay to use the supercomputer for such things as vehicle-collision
modeling.

Industry use of the center is most common, he said, during spring and winter breaks and other
times when university researchers typically take off.

“During December and January, we can fill those months with private-sector functions,” Shah
said.

All of these changes will be celebrated starting at 4 p.m. Thursday at an anniversary reception
at the University Plaza Hotel, 3110 Olentangy River Rd.

Heimaster and Pitzer said they are proud of what they helped create.

“I think it’s had a really transformative effect on science here,” Heimaster said. “It has been
an important factor in recruiting the best faculty and best students to Ohio.”